Page 59 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

“Well,” he sighed. “Don’t think it would last long. Not if they eat brains. So much stupid out there in the world the poor zombie bastards’d starve to death.”

“Bad day at the office,” she said.

“Bad decade,” he said. “Still – the island. Good idea. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Out of sight would be good,” she said, looking round. “This place is like living in a fishbowl.”

“Yeah?” he said, following her eyes as she looked back up the hill towards the facility.

“More like an aquarium,” she said. “Crowds shuffling past us all the time. Nurses. Doctors. Scientists, researchers… and recently a lot more of the sinister who-the-fuck-knows coming for a look at us lab rats.”

“Everyone wants to see the black swans,” he said.

“Black swan, lab rat, whatever,” she said. “We agreed to come and help. The longer I don’t get pregnant, the more they prod and poke, and you know? Maybe that was it, maybe we just had our one last shot and no amount of this in vitro shit is going to change that.”

“You want to stop, we just tell them,” he said.

“It’s easier for you,” she said. “You just had to leave a quick deposit in their sperm bank and get back to working in the real world.”

“What’s left of it,” he said, after a beat.

This was always a point of contention for them. As was the fact that he appeared to be sure that things would go bad sooner than she did.

“It’s not so bad. Not yet,” she said. “Much as I’m up for the zombie apocalypse, it’s not dystopia…”

“No. It’s this-topia,” he said. “And that’s bad enough.”

“What’s yanked your tail, Eeyore?” she said. “Thought you were meant to be boosting my morale here…”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just the usual. They’re flying me out east again. Private jet.”

“Fancy,” she said. “But you could say no.”

“Maybe I will,” he said.

“No you won’t,” she said. “You’re a systems engineer. You like fixing things.”

“That’s why I might say no,” he said. “I should stay here and fix us. Especially if you think they aren’t being straight with you.”

“We’re fine,” she said. “I was feeling a bit negative. You solved that. Now there’s a plan, now I have Hope I don’t feel so claustrophobic. It was just this place making me a bit nuts. And the hormones, I suppose…”

Two days later she waved him off from the station and walked back to the facility, unaware she was being watched, with approval, by the Chief Psych Officer who was monitoring the feed from the station camera.

“She’s fine,” she said, looking up at the scientist sitting on the edge of her desk who had one eye on whatever he was scrolling through on his iPad, the other on the grainy security camera feed.

“But she’s still not pregnant,” he said, swivelling the iPad and showing her a panel of test results.

“Frankly,” she said. “Not my problem. But you have a plan for that, don’t you?”

Chapter 20

If not you, who?

Mouse – Year 201 AG

This is how I saw the bear. We’d kept ourselves out of sight in the Bunker for two days since we’d seen the smoke in the sky with one of us, Cat or I, creeping out at dawn and midday and dusk to climb the Tower and scan the terrain between us and the distant ridge with the binoculars. We were looking for more fires, more smoke, more Russians.

It was a futile task really, because anyone could creep up on us easily without ever having to come out from under the canopy of trees that blanketed the landscape. I scoured the arc of countryside between me and where the distant fire had marked the sky with its plume of smoke, but I didn’t have much hope of seeing anyone travelling towards us. Trees and vegetation had swallowed whole villages and small towns, toppling walls, bursting through roofs and then hiding them beneath clouds of leaves and if I couldn’t see the remains of villages or towns, I had little hope of seeing something as tiny as a person or a horse unless they lit another fire. Which, unhelpfully, they didn’t.